Muton has some splendid photos of fossil spiders.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Muton has some splendid photos of fossil spiders.
Don’t forget—there’s another Tangled Bank coming up on Wednesday, 2 August, at Science and Reason, so mail those links to Charles Daney, host@tangledbank.net, or me.
Isn’t that a sweet little old lady? I guess the sign offended a few people, though, and they turned her in to the police.
Insisting that the sign was simply a lark, Mrs Grove said yesterday that she had never received any complaints about it. But police ordered her to take it down and her details were taken. Once the officers left she hung the sign back up.
I like that last bit—what a simple no-nonsense response to bureaucratic BS.
She said: “it’s been there for more than 30 years and all the people who live nearby are used to it. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never had any complaints with any religion. The sign is just a lark that’s been there for a long time.
I don’t know. I’m looking at that obviously vicious little puppy and wondering how many Jehovah’s Witnesses he had eaten that day.
At least the British seem relatively civil about the whole thing. Symbols seem to inflame a whole ‘nother level of insanity in this country.
(hat tip: Richard Dawkins. Yeah, that Richard Dawkins.)
Some days, you just want to give up the arguing and go rest your head on the desk for a while. No matter how dumb you think the opposition is, they’ll always manage to say something dumber than you can imagine.
Since I shared one paper describing how cephalopods attack, here’s another showing step two: what to do with your prey once it is snared by your suckered limbs. Here’s a sampling from a video sequence of an octopus reaching out to grab some food and bring it back to the mouth:
If anyone is interested in writing a Lovecraftian horror novel and getting all the details just right, I recommend this paper by Kier and Leeuwen. They used a high-speed camera to capture exactly how a squid, Loligo pealei, strikes and seizes its prey. Isn’t it beautiful?
I’m heading in to Minneapolis for my morning at Camp Quest tomorrow—comments awaiting authorization may be held up for a while, so don’t panic.
I may just pop in to the Minneapolis Drinking Liberally event tonight—we’ll find out who actually reads the blog by who is surprised. There’s also a Morris Drinking Liberally tonight that I’ll have to miss, unfortunately.
I am going mildly nuts right now—somehow, I managed to arrange things so multiple deadlines hit me on one day: tomorrow. I’ve got a new lecture to polish up for our introductory biology course, a small grant proposal due, and of course, tomorrow evening is our second Café Scientifique. Let’s not forget that I also have a neurobiology lecture to give this afternoon, and I owe them a stack of grading which is not finished yet. I’m really looking forward to Wednesday.
Anyway, so my new lecture for our introductory biology course is on…creationism, yuck. What I’m planning to do is to describe some of the most common creationist arguments and then give a biologist’s rebuttal. Creationism is really a waste of our class time, but using it to explain some general concepts that any informed biologist should understand (and that the creationists, including Mike Behe, are astonishingly clueless about) will make it a little more productive, I hope. We’ll find out tomorrow.
One of the common creationist claims I plan to shoot down is the whole idea of “irreducible complexity” as an obstacle to evolution. I was going to bring up two ideas that invalidate it: the principle of scaffolding (which I discussed here), and exaptation, in which features evolved for some other purpose than the one that they play in an organism we observe today. I was looking for a good example, and then John Wilkins fortuitously sent me a paper that filled the bill (we evilutionists, you know, are sneakily sending each other data behind the scenes to help in our assault on ignorance. We’re devious that way.)
Yikes—it’s like some kind of horror movie: Inhofe meets Robertson.
Look, Pat, I don’t have to tell you about reading the Scriptures, but one of mine that I’ve always enjoyed is Romans 1, 22 and 23. You quit worshipping God and start worshipping the creation — the creeping things, the four-legged beasts, the birds and all that. That’s their god. That’s what they worship.
I’m not a big fan of the Bible, and every time I do dig into it, I find myself disgusted—and this is no exception. I had to look up Romans.
